Nokia has lifted the curtain on the Nokia Booklet 3G, a 10" netbook running …

Share this story

Nokia is moving further away from its core cellphone business, today announcing its first netbook. While the evolution from 3G handset and Internet tablet maker to netbook designer may have been inevitable, the combination of hardware and software in the Nokia Booklet 3G will see the company embrace both Intel and Windows 7, instead of heading deeper into the ARM and Linux territory it staked out with its Internet tablets.

The decision to go Wintel with its first netbook offering doesn't rule out a Linux-plus-ARM netbook (smartbook) down the road, however. More on that in a bit.

In some ways, the Nokia Booklet 3G is standard Netbook stuff. It will run Windows 7 on an Intel Atom CPU while offering wireless broadband connectivity via WiFi or 3G. It's also small, at less than an inch thick and about 2.75 lb. There's the expected built-in Bluetooth, webcam, and SD card reader as well. Where the Booklet diverges from the the budget netbook norm is in its chassis and HD video options.

The Booklet is constructed out of aluminum and will feature what Nokia describes as a "10-inch glass HD ready display." "HD ready" implies something better than the de rigueur 1024x600 display typically seen on budget netbooks, and the inclusion of an HDMI port on the Booklet is another indication that Nokia wants the netbook to really hum when it comes to HD video playback.

There are no detailed tech specs available for the Booklet yet, and Nokia's official introduction won't come until Nokia World bows in Stuttgart on September 2. But the timing of the announcement and the touted 12 hours of battery life lead us to believe that the Booklet is going to be one of the first Pine Trail netbooks to ship.

Pine Trail is Intel's new netbook platform, offering a more tightly integrated version of the popular Atom CPU that puts the memory controller, GPU, and CPU together on the same die. That means just two chips in the Pine Trail platform (instead of three), resulting in lower power draw and manufacturing costs. Pine Trail products aren't supposed to ship until late this year, meaning that Nokia's Booklet may not be available until sometime around the holidays.

Whither Maemo?

While Nokia dropped hints as far back as February that it would be getting into the netbook market, the decision to go with a Wintel software/hardware stack may come as a surprise given all of the resources the company has dedicated to Linux and ARM development over the years. Nokia pioneered the Mobile Internet Device (MID)/Internet tablet segment with the 770 Internet Tablet and its successors, the N800 and N810. All three of those devices use Maemo, Nokia's Debian-based Linux platform, and run on ARM-based OMAP processors. Nokia released the Maemo 5 SDK beta this past May, which intends to get the most out of the TI OMAP3 CPU.

Maemo is designed to run on small touchscreen devices, but there's no reason it couldn't be adapted for netbooks, � la Android. There are other ARM-based options available, including an Ubuntu ARM port, an effort strongly backed by Nokia. So the software part of the equation is there for Nokia—or just about.

The biggest challenge for a Nokia Linux-ARM netbook at this point is the hardware. As we pointed out in February, the two best options for Nokia in terms of hardware are the TI OMAP3 and OMAP4 CPUs. The highest-profile win for the OMAP3 so far is the Palm Pre. What the OMAP3 lacks, however, is the sufficient raw processing power for the kind of netbook envisioned by the Nokia Booklet 3G.

There's a 45nm OMAP3 on the way, but a process ramp won't be sufficient to address all of the OMAP3's performance shortcomings. Nokia is likely to instead wait for the OMAP4 before launching a smartbook. The OMAP4 will run at speeds of over 1GHz, will be built on a 45nm process, and will provide sufficient smartbook horsepower. It's not slated to go into volume production until the second half of 2010, however.

With the netbook scene exploding, Nokia obviously believes that the time is right for it to get in on the action. And since its ARM+Linux homebrew needs some more fermentation before being uncorked, Nokia is counting on a combination of the latest Intel and Microsoft offerings as well as some solid industrial design to make an impact in the market. But don't rule out a Nokia smartbook using Maemo or Ubuntu running on an OMAP4 CPU sometime next year or in early 2011.